It is very difficult to write a review about one of the most loved, written about and highly acclaimed games of all time. 1997 I believe it was when the game was released, I wasn’t quite a teenager. It was hugely popular then, and in the intervening nearly thirty years it has been critically cemented as one of the greatest stories ever told, in any format. For those who experienced it then, the triple disc playstation release felt special to begin with. Looking back it feels nostalgic just to remember what opening that case felt like. The first time you took out a disc and placed it in the machine, the opening titles, the first hour of play… that was it, the start of a lifelong love for the world, the characters, the art, the story.
In 2026 we have seen everything analysed and over analysed in some cases. Any reviews now seem to have to try and be deliberately different to merit being written. I hope my review is not that.
Instead, I want to talk about what the story does better than any other game story I can think of, and most literary works. It leaves space for the player’s imagination.
For many people, especially those who, like me, were young when they first played it, they may not even have fully understood the game’s story at the time.
The game would have been good enough as a fairly generic RPG just based on the combat system mechanics. The materia system had its own, internally consistent metaphysics, which was hugely satisfying to manage and deploy.
Many first time players could be forgiven for accepting the prompts to overwrite the character names first time around. Personally I chose my own name for the protagonist and the names of my most beloved pets for the rest of the cast. With hindsight, whilst that’s a cute personal memory for me, it was not the right choice. The character names are too important to the story and deserve their place along side some of the great character names in literature; Ebenezer Scrooge, Cruella De Vil and Heathcliff spring to mind.
Just the names were wonderful. In the UK version, for the main cast we got Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, Barret, Red XIII and Sephiroth. Add to that Cid, Vincent, Yuffie. We won’t mention the joke character: you know who I mean: let’s just pretend he never existed. On top of that we got a whole host of mostly morally grey sub-plot characters: The Turks, various Shinra executives, Hojo, Lucretia and more. I later learned that many of the names derive from certain forms of religious mysticism. I won’t attempt to analyse the deeper origins of each name here, as I will probably mangle it. Suffice to say, there is deep meaning there, as well as the beautiful aesthetic.
The point about the names could be distilled to this one: Cloud Strife. It captures everything so economically in two syllables: on one level it is his slightly moody, aloof at times persona, his head literally in the clouds at times. Then we add layers: trouble, hardship… storm clouds become implied. Finally, by the time we realise the extent of his confusion about his own identity, we think of what is being clouded from view. There is another character who some of us went on to love possibly most of all, who barely appears in the game and yet looms so large over it. Zack Fair. I could talk about him all day: in my view he is perhaps the purest hero of any story outside of Christian depictions of Jesus in the Bible… which is really saying something. There are many parallels too. That discussion is for another time. For now “fair’ covers it: he is not physically fair, and therefore it embodies both the contradiction of what the world makes of him, versus the truly fair being he is at his core, again, incredibly economical storytelling. For the purists: yes I know his surname was not mentioned in the original game, but it is an invention of the same amazing writer, and the point stands.
The game was released at a time before it was possible to create endless feeling fully explorable expansive maps. The graphics were good for the time, but blocky and stilted by today’s standards. To me this only adds to the appeal. The player had to fill in the gaps in their mind. The story had a similar quality. On the first play through, the story works on an almost surface level: a giant corporation inflicts environmental harm on the planet, a rebel group fights the good fight against it. There’s depth even there: Avalanche- could be considered a terrorist group in the eyes of some. If Shinra were a real company today, no doubt they would have a PR facade like any other multi-national corporate pushing politically correct messaging, leaving the “little people” to argue amongst themselves, in safely controlled factions, whilst the real agenda of corporatisation of everything rumbles on.
Then you get into the layers of the story. Identity, loyalty, conflict, power… a modern world militating against nature and tradition. The fictional country of Wutai is a great microcosm for the one of the game’s core themes. A parochial civilisation forged in honour and hand-to-hand combat, elevating the warrior class, such as elswhere might be embodied in the Knight or the Samurai, above all. The tragedy is palpable, as you learn how it was overpowered, commodified and reduced to a tourist attraction by an outside world of modern weaponry and mass market economics.
Deeper still, the natural world and its ancient spiritual guardians: forgotten about, exploited, experimented upon by a modern military industrial complex. Aerith, Vincent and Red XIII all feel the generational impact, and each of those beautiful souls is tormented by it in a different way. Sephiroth receives the same treatment, but turns to a darker conclusion. In many ways he is a Lucifer archetype, the writers make that blindingly obvious. Gloriously powerful and magnificent… but introverted, wounded first by the world, and then spiritually mutilated by his own self pity. In the end he is pitiable, but the spectre of his former magnificence remains undiminished, even after his ultimate defeat.
Perhaps years after my first playing of the game, I started to realise its full meaning. Ultimately it boils down to the consequence of Zack’s sacrifice. In one moment, he gave something of himself and created an imprint on a damaged soul. The rest of the game plays out as Cloud’s journey of self realisation, and back to that narrative point. Cloud starts as a damaged vessel carrying a message it lacks the capacity to read. He’s barely even a person to begin with. He is carrying a surface level aesthetic and an attitude which he himself doesn’t understand and can’t quite pull off. Somehow he knows he has a duty to come good on a promise he couldn’t speak, but is duty bound to by fate. The duty to fulfil the promise of a person you idolised, and who gave their life so that you could live, and carry on their fight for them. It’s beyond heavy. It’s crushingly powerful, almost impossible to fulfil, and about as deeply meaningful as any reason for any person to do anything, let alone save the world. What makes Cloud so loveable, is that he goes and does it, and in doing so, lives up to the promise of two souls. His own and that of his Hero.
Kazushige Nojima, you gave us more than a story. Like Zack gave to Cloud: You gave us something to try and live up to.
